For those of you who have been following this weekly series you were probably expecting another look at baptism…well if so you will need to wait until next week. In honor of Easter I decided to take a detour and spend a few minutes looking at resurrection. While this may not seem like much of a stretch for Easter, it actually is. It is a stretch because most of us do not grow up with a Biblically based understanding of resurrection. We don't because much of what we have heard at funerals or in casual conversation is that resurrection means living eternally in heaven. Though this is the common way of understanding resurrection it is not scriptural. So let's take a moment to look at the Biblical concept.
We will begin by examining what resurrection was not for First Century Jews. It was not reincarnation where someone comes back to life multiple times as someone or something else. Though Hinduism has reincarnation as one of its central tenants, neither Judaism nor Christianity ever believed in that concept. Resurrection is also not coming back as a ghost or spirit. Judaism again had a particular word for spirit or ghost. We know this because spirits and ghosts are mentioned in Hebrew and early Christian literature (including the book of Acts). Resurrection was also not eternal life in heaven. Eternal life was given to the righteous and they would remain with God until the final judgment at which time all persons would be "resurrected" and judged by God (remember Jesus' stories about sheep and goats, wheat and tares).
So what then was/is resurrection? Resurrection was the raising to earthly, physical life someone who had died. We can see this in the Lazarus story in the Gospel of John. In this story Lazarus, a friend of Jesus, dies. Jesus arrives three days later. He goes with Lazarus' sisters to the tomb where he tells them to roll back the stone (sound familiar?). The people protest because Lazarus' body will smell. Nevertheless they roll the stone back. Jesus prays. Lazarus emerges, alive (remember he was dead), still wrapped in his grave clothes. This is resurrection. Someone is dead and then they are physically alive. This view of resurrection was part and parcel of First Century Judaism. The only issue was that while some prophets like Jesus could, with God's help, raise people from the dead (there were stories about Elijah and Elisha doing the same thing) only God could raise human beings unilaterally…as God did with Jesus on the first Easter.
The belief that Jesus was dead (on the cross) on Friday and then alive (as witnessed by the women) on Sunday is the heart of the Christian faith. As the Apostle Paul wrote in his letter to the Corinthian church, without the resurrection "our faith would be in vain." It would be in vain because if Jesus was not raised from the dead, then Jesus is just another messianic pretender, killed by the Romans in a very brutal way. If Jesus is not raised then death and evil still win. Paul defended his belief in the resurrection by appealing to the more than 500 persons who had seen, spoken with and even eaten with the risen Jesus. Paul does not claim to know the physics or even the metaphysics of how resurrection occurs; he only knows that it does. And when it does it is a mystery.
The final outcome of the concept of the resurrection is the belief that one day God will resurrect all of us. Jesus was the first to be raised and all of us will follow. When that day is, no one knows. But we proclaim that heaven is not our final destination…earth is; an earth in which the resurrected will live with God forever. I know that these are hard concepts for many of us to wrap our heads around (death to life as well as living again here on earth) but they are the Biblical view of the future. They are a view of the future that ought to give us the courage and hope to live each day with meaning, knowing that our lives matter not only in the moment but forever.
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